A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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Topic: International Economics and Development

Free market incentives are spectacularly changing lives over much of the world. In the last 25 years, hundreds of millions of people—400 million in China alone—have climbed out of the dire poverty of living on less than $1 per day. It is the largest movement out of poverty in human history. At 10 p.m. EST on Tuesday, April 24, HDNet will be premiering the documentary The Ultimate Resource, which tells the story of what can happen when ordinary people around the world are given the tools to help themselves. Cato senior fellow Johan Norberg, James Tooley, the author of several Cato policy papers, and noted scholars Muhammad Yunus and Hernando de Soto, are featured in the production.

The International Monetary Fund has published a study that seeks to use a neutral formula for determining which jurisdictions are tax havens. The formula used is far from ideal, focusing primarily on the size of the financial services sector relative to the overall economy rather than specific policies such as privacy laws and/or information-sharing policies. But it is worth noting that the United Kingdom was placed on the list of major offshore centers. Does anybody want to guess when the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development will put the UK on its “tax haven” blacklist? If you answered never, you get a gold star. The OECD is infamous for targeting small and relatively powerless jurisdictions, while giving a free pass to its own member nations - such as the UK, US, Netherlands, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria, and Belgium - that have tax haven policies (see this study from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity for more information). In any event, the IMF study is good news since it further exposes OECD hypocrisy and enables persecuted low-tax jurisdictions to more effectively resist pressure from high-tax nations. The IMF study also is good news, since it upsets leftists in the UK, as this column in the Observer illustrates:

The International Monetary Fund has effectively branded Britain a tax haven. The world’s most important financial organisation last week published a working paper seeking a definition of offshore financial centres. For the very first time it ranked Britain alongside the likes of Bermuda and the Cayman Islands - unregulated jurisdictions associated with illicit funds. …The City of London is the world’s largest tax haven… The UK has become a centre for illicit funds drained from many of the world’s poorer countries, and British offshore secrecy prevents those countries from running effective tax regimes.

The news pages of the Wall Street Journal have an excellent article showing how nations in Europe are cutting corporate tax rates in an effort to compete for jobs and capital. The politicians and bureaucrats do not like this process, of course, but European Commission-led efforts to harmonize taxes fortunately have failed. In closing, the WSJ article cites a post on the Cato blog about the shame of America having a higher corporate tax rate than France:

Europe’s major economies are competing with one another to cut corporate taxes as they fight to attract and keep investment, fueling a trend that has taken Europe’s corporate-tax rates below those of other regions. Nominal tax rates on corporate income in the European Union average 26%, compared with 30% in the Asian-Pacific region and nearly 40% in the U.S. The latest moves by European governments suggest business taxes in the EU will fall further in coming years. … In recent years, many smaller European nations – including Ireland and the former Soviet-bloc nations of Eastern Europe – have slashed corporate-tax rates to as low as zero, as part of their economic-growth strategies, and have succeeded in attracting investment from multinational corporations. That success has put pressure on Europe’s larger economies to cut their taxes. Until recently, Germany condemned the low-tax competition from Poland and others as “tax dumping.” But after failing to win support within the EU, Germany has joined in: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition has agreed to cut the corporate-tax rate to just under 30% next year from 39%. Others in Western Europe have reacted to the tax cut in Germany, Europe’s largest economy. In March, Britain’s finance chief, Gordon Brown, announced a reduction to 28% from 30%, following complaints from British companies that Britain was losing its status as one of Europe’s low-tax countries. Nicolas Sarkozy, a leading contender to become France’s next president, wants to cut the French corporate-tax rate to less than 28% from around 34%, albeit with some vaguely defined strings attached. … Elsewhere in Europe, Spain is reducing its tax rate on corporate profits to 30% from 35% in stages. … The Cato Institute in Washington, a free-market think tank, calls it “rather embarrassing” that France has a lower corporate-tax rate than the U.S.

I don’t know all of these companies, so I made some educated guesses about the links (and I may have gotten the wrong division of Motorola), but it appears that fully 11 of the 15 participants are in the biometrics industry.

Nations such as France and Germany already are over-burdened by excessive taxes and spending, but things are going to get worse. A column in the Wall Street Journal notes that the number of potential workers per retiree is going to shrink dramatically. This helps explain, of course, why so many European politicians are opposed to tax competition. Mobility of labor and capital undermines their ability to keep Ponzi schemes afloat:

A shrinking population in itself is not necessarily a problem. But the rise in the “old age dependency” most definitely is. Fewer and fewer younger workers will have to finance the retirement of more and more elderly people in need of a range of support services from pensions to health care. European Commission forecasts suggest that the number of people aged 65 and older as a percentage of the working population (aged 15-64) will more than double between now and 2050 to 53% from 25%. …A continuation of the current pay-as-you-go pension systems, where employee contributions are used to pay for the pensions of those already retired, seems unsustainable. It would require an almost superhuman willingness among the shrinking pool of workers to pay ever rising payroll taxes for the increasing ranks of the older generation. It would overstretch the solidarity between generations and would only accelerate an already observable brain drain. Many of the most talented Europeans are already looking for higher salaries and lower taxes abroad.

But Americans should not gloat. Entitlement programs are pushing the United States in the same direction.

Politicians in Washington are quite adept at wasting money and coming up with clever excuses for new programs, but they are rank amateurs compared to their counterparts across the ocean. In Europe, politicians and bureaucrats have become so adept at twisting words that the European Commission actually announced that it “protected taxpayers’ interests” by spending almost every penny it received. The EU Observerreports on this Kafka-esque abuse of language:

The European Union has become better at spending money resulting in EU capitals getting back less of their annual membership fee, the European Commission has announced. …Out of the €107.4 billion EU spending finally agreed on for 2006 only €950 million was left unused - down from €1 billion in 2005. “Improved budget management and better planning help protect taxpayers’ interests,” said EU budget commissioner Dalia Grybauskaite in a statement. …the European Union is not allowed to make any profit and any surplus is therefore channelled back to EU member states’ coffers by way of a rebate on the year’s EU fee.

For too long, American consumers and taxpayers have been supporting farmers, many of whom run successful agribusinesses (for more information on subsidies and who receives them, see the excellent work of the Environmental Working Group here). Removing price supports, import barriers and subsidies will save taxpayers and consumers billions of dollars and will expose farmers to the 21st century economy. To the extent that reforms help to achieve a successful conclusion to the Doha round of multilateral trade negotiations, American businesses (including farmers) and consumers will gain further.

How would we propose to achieve all this, given the notorious power of the farm lobby? A one-time, limited buyout of commodity support coupled with legislative changes and contracts.